


The Extended Biography of a Hickey

by maelidify



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: 18+, AU where there are more days between trips I guess, F/M, Lucy tries to use logic, dommy!Flynn, ish, it is not super effective, late-ish season two au, more time for the kissing and the whatnot, this is maybe not super healthy?, wherein they definitely have sex in the bunker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 07:17:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17239850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: "Really?” she finally says, to no one. Then she stalks (quietly; it is four in the morning and she doesn’t want to wake anyone else up) to his room, where he is getting dressed slowly, lazily. She points at her neck. “Really?” she says again, practically hissing.





	The Extended Biography of a Hickey

**Author's Note:**

> Kindly do not read my smutty nonsense if you're a minor. Thanks!  
> .  
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It’s only the second time they’ve done this. But, washing off in the bathroom afterwards, Lucy notices a dark splotch blossoming on the side of her neck, reaching out to her collarbone and hovering nearly green in the dim lighting. She doesn’t touch it, but her expression in the mirror is murderous.  
  
“Really?” she finally says, to no one. Then she stalks (quietly; it is four in the morning and she doesn’t want to wake anyone else up) to his room, where he is getting dressed slowly, lazily. She points at her neck. “ _Really?”_ she says again, practically hissing.  
  
When he looks up at her, taking his time, his gaze lingers in something like satisfaction. He is trying not to smirk. She sees it in his face’s tension, the light quirk of his lips; it’s still unsettling and almost striking to see Flynn smile. This doesn’t deter her. This doesn’t make it better.  
  
“What, are you in high school?” she asks, exasperated.  
  
He says, “If it makes you feel better, it wasn’t on purpose,” and reclines in the one chair in his sparse room, his long legs seemingly taking up half the space. A power move. He isn’t threatened by her hovering in front of his (softly closed) door, by her righteous indignation.  “Suits you, though.”  
  
He _would_ think so. “I knew this was a bad idea.”  
  
“And yet,” he says carefully, studying her from the corner of his eye. The smirk is barely hidden now.  
  
She used to hate how he looked at her, like he could unfold parts of her brain that she had no access to. She still hates it, but she’s found there’s also something _about_ it, like when she’s sitting next to him in front of the television, gloom thrown over her arms like a blanket, his eyes doing that vulnerable calculation… or waking up, watching him pour her a cup of coffee, that _look_ and the indentation of his mouth and the wide cast of his shoulders and the space between them, ugly space, shadows and warehouse cement floors…  
  
And anyway, she’d kissed that look away from him a few nights before, and now this. Her hair is still tangled and she feels pale and small, but he looks at her like she’s a textbook.  
  
This is a carefully chosen analogy, because Lucy loves textbooks, but it shouldn’t be dwelled upon.  
  
She sits down on his bed in a huff, trying to ignore the tactile memory she now has of those dingy sheets, which were spread out on the floor just a few moments prior. “Have you considered how this is going to affect our work? Aside,” she says as he opens his mouth, “from the pissing contest you’re having with Wyatt.”  
  
This is, perhaps, the wrong thing to say. “I didn’t think this had anything to do with Wyatt,” he says darkly.  
  
She ignores that, and the twist in her stomach, maybe butterflies dying. The real butterfly effect. “Say I need to pass for nobility in 1855 or something,” she continues. “You’ve just made this that much harder.”  
  
“Why 1855?”  
  
“The first mention of hickeys in literature. Don’t change the subject.”  
  
He does that _thing_ where he bites his cheeks, making his face briefly gaunt in either frustration or amusement. Or both. Finally, he says, “I’ll try not to do it again in the future. Happy?”  
  
She stands up and crosses to the door. Then she makes a decision and turns to meet his eyes. “What makes you think this is going to happen again?”  
  
That warrants a laugh, and he stands up, walking towards her. She is aware, as often she is, of the build of him, the lanky angles, the way he moves like an exaggeration of himself. In a few steps he’s leaning over her, Adam’s apple to the top of her head, a brief surge of body heat and closeness, to open the door.  
  
Then he glances at her as though he’s saying, _Well? Leave, then._  
  
It’s a challenge. They’ve always been good at those, but her laugh when she exits is soft, and his answering grin betrays some sort of fondness she can’t think about too intently. And when she turns around in the bunker hallway, he’s still watching her.  
  
Well. She knew he would be.  

 

* * *

  
Lucy would like to think this is just to get back at Wyatt. To distract herself from the rustling of bed springs from his and Jessica’s room. To remind herself that she’s desirable, that her mind is compelling enough to distract even the most destructive of forces. A _take that_. An _I don’t need you_. A _see? I’m quite literally sleeping with the (former) enemy and there’s nothing you can do about it._    
  
It isn’t, but that’s what she’d like to think.  
  
The first time it happens, it’s this: She’s given Rufus and Jiya her room again, and she is sitting comfortably on Flynn’s floor, slowly working her way through a beer. And Flynn is across from her, cross-legged, looking oddly buoyant, like he’s swallowed a star.  
  
“I’m still not used to the clothes,” he says after a sip.  
  
She raises an eyebrow. “Explain.”  
  
He gestures to her with the neck of his bottle, giving her a quick once-over. “I’m more used to seeing you in all kinds of ridiculous… petticoats, pillbox hats, whatever.” His accent hardens the _r_ and she tries not to find it endearing.  
  
“Is it a let-down?” she asks, wondering, as soon as the question leaves her mouth, why she’d asked it. She isn’t one to care about her appearance, and his disparaging comment a few weeks ago when she first saw him in prison had barely registered as an insult.  
  
_Oh_ , she realizes, after the fact. She’s flirting.  
  
He laughs. “Never.”  
  
He’s probably flirting back, and she remembers the way he’d looked at her in the car in 1936 a few nights back, like there was some kind of new light in him, a secret he could share with her. And his face that next morning when she’d woken up chastely in his bed, slightly hungover on vodka after talking for hours. If someone had told her a few months ago that they’d get this close… well he had, hadn’t he?  
  
_He’s a murderer_ , she tells herself, a half-hearted attempt at remaining cerebral in his presence, which is growing increasingly more comforting with each passing day. But murder, sadly, has become something abstract; the dark has touched all of them, so judgement isn’t as easy as it used to be.  
  
Still, she riffs off that. “You’re also used to seeing me foil your schemes.” She takes a sip, basking in her ridiculous statement and keeping unwavering eye contact. Cerebral reasoning be damned. This is fun, taunting the villain.  
  
Another laugh and he leans forward, almost conspiratorial. “Not always,” he says.  
  
Frustratingly true. “Often enough,” she says, even if it isn’t enough for her taste, or wasn’t at the time. She realizes she has leaned forward too and he’s studying her in that way of his, the dim lights flickering over the rough lines of his face. She hates it. So, before she can second guess herself, she kisses him.  
  
He seems to freeze before leaning into her. There’s something uncertain in his movements and she basks for a moment in the twinge of power, in making such a dangerous person so visibly vulnerable.  
  
When he pulls back he looks at her, and she can tell it means _are you sure?_  
  
She gives him a hard look. A challenge. So he growls a little and leans forward, pulling her face to his by the nape of her neck.  
  
The gruff motion pulls a sigh out of her and she nips at his mouth, wrapping her arms around him in turn. He takes control and she lets him; the beer is knocked over and soon she is flat on her back, his weight balanced above her by the elbows, his mouth grazing her collarbone. He noses the side of her neck and she feels oddly exposed, like he’s pulling away layers of her skin to get to the part he wants.  
  
Well. He soon does that with her clothes, anyway, tugging her loose-fitting shirt up on her body, pressing hard kisses to her breasts. He bites hard just north of her nipple and she twists his hair, warranting another growl. Good. A positive outlet, she tells herself, for his rougher tendencies.  
  
When the alarm goes off, he looks up and curses in a different language. Then he presses a strange kiss to the top of her hair as she bites back a smile and fixes her top.

* * *

  
Anyway, that was the first time anything like that happened, and it occurred just a few nights before the _second_ time, which was last night. Which resulted on the blotchy monstrosity gracing the side of her neck. After tossing and turning for a couple hours on the couch she finally digs some old makeup out of a bag full of odds and ends trudges to the bathroom.  
  
Jiya walks in on her as she’s rubbing the pale foundation into her neck. She gives her a sideways glance.  
  
“Not a word,” Lucy says in a low voice, “to anyone.”  
  
“I wasn’t saying anything.” But the other woman studies her for a long moment and then says, “Okay, since I’m sure you’re not hooking up with Connor Mason…”  
  
“Whatever your other guess is, it’s probably right,” she says flatly. The foundation looks unnatural, a layer of ill-fitting skin over her skin. She tries to blur the edges.  
  
Jiya’s eyes widen a little. Honestly, Lucy thinks, you’d think this girl had bigger things to worry about than who was breaking whose blood vessels. Visions, death, that kind of thing. “Tell me it isn’t…?”  
  
“Can’t do that.” Lucy finally looks at her friend imploringly, wondering what she must think of her. “Just… please don’t say anything to Wyatt. Or to your boyfriend, which would be essentially the same thing.”  
  
“Rufus is the gossip, not me.” There’s a flicker of sadness in her expression, and for a moment, Lucy is almost happy to distract her with inane, immature bunker drama.  
  
But not that happy. Lucy narrows her eyes when Jiya says, “So, uh, don’t most guys stop doing that when they’re young? Ish?”  
  
 “Apparently not.”  
  
And then the loud voices of Rufus and Wyatt hover outside the door and they fall silent.

* * *

  
The second time, he’s ready.  
  
It’s the night after returning from a mission in the eighties and she’s still _tired_ from it. It’s an ecstatic type of weariness, the way she used to feel after delivering a particularly good lecture. A kind of warmth; Agent Christopher’s smile, the idea that at least _one_ family could be protected. For now.  
  
Unlike her, with her broken bits and pieces, and unlike someone else. Someone whose door she approaches once everyone else goes to bed, in spite of the exhaustion. Maybe the warmth is mixed with bitterness; maybe (definitely) Flynn will understand.  
  
She’s already spoken to him the previous day, about the journal, about _her_. But the lonely, displaced, weary energy keeps her awake, and somehow, she knows he can feel it too.  
  
She doesn’t knock, but she doesn’t need to. He’s leaning against the wall when she steps inside, a smile playing on his lips, and he closes the door with one hand. Then he grabs her and pushes her against it, hands gripping her waist, and she kisses him almost harder than he is kissing her. Don’t think about it, she tells herself again, and it’s easy not to.  
  
When they part for air, he whispers, “Did you miss me today?” His voice is scratchy in her ear, his breath warm.  
  
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she says, but there’s no bite to her words. Instead, she presses her teeth to the hollow of his throat, relishing the resulting hiss of pain and something else. His hands tighten on her waist.  
  
“Stop playing with fire, Lucy,” he says, looking down at her darkly, and it’s something about how he says her name. How he always says her name.  
  
“Stop talking,” she says in response. His grimace is half amused, half annoyed, but then he lifts her and she wraps her legs around his waist, relishing the unkind press of his mouth to her throat and the merciless throbbing between her legs. He pushes against her, a dry thrust, and she can feel the effect she’s having on him.  
  
Copulating against a door may not be the most subtle idea; they slow down but there’s an ember in his eyes, a fire that can be stoked. Dangerous indeed. He lets her down and she hastily grabs the bedding from his mattress, barely able to spread it beneath her on the floor before he’s on top of her again, a hand beneath her skull and the floor, his knees between her thighs. Some sort of barely domesticated animal. She can’t say there isn’t an _appeal_ to this, to the way he looks down at her from beneath mussed hair as he slides his hand out of her hair and into the waist of her sweatpants, thumbing at her clit with a feral urgency.  
  
She cries out in spite of herself. He puts his other hand over her mouth and she suddenly feels like his captive again, but the notion doesn’t bother her and she tries not to dwell too much on the problematic implications of that particular thought process.  
  
“We don’t want any eavesdroppers, do we?” he mutters, voice rough and maybe a little satisfied for all that. She’s sure he wouldn’t mind people knowing, based on the way he hovers next to her on missions, or when crowding around the computer, or when pouring cereal in the morning, shoulder brushing shoulder…  
  
She shakes her head and he moves his hand, bringing it down to her own, which is gripping the sharp side of his hip. When he wraps his long fingers around her wrist he looks her in the eyes, asking a silent question. They both know what they’re doing, this strange relinquishing of power. Somehow, she trusts him. She gives him a small nod and he lifts her wrist above her head, pressing it into the floor. His hold is unrelenting.  
  
It itself, the display of dominance is almost as effective as the circles he’s pressing into her with his other hand. This controlled helplessness is really something, and the shards of worry and loneliness begin to melt away as he slides her pants off her legs, releasing her momentarily to unbuckle his belt before pinning her again, this time wrapping both wrists in one hand. She shivers as he slides into her, as he turns her face to his with damp fingers. He whispers, “Look at me, Lucy,” and she does, looking him in the eye as he adjusts and pulls out and thrusts back in, hard, greedy.  
  
The moan in her throat dies softly on its way out. He’s kissing her and she’s kissing back-- she can only be so passive for the sake of a sex game. His grip is just tight enough to hold her as he works to a steady pace, her movements against him awkward at first until they find a rhythm. His other hand moves from her cheek to her neck, hovering on her jawbone before palming her breast.    
  
It’s overwhelming and dark and she couldn’t analyze it if she tried; the thrill of his long body, his mouth worrying the skin on her neck, sucking and biting. She feels enveloped in shadows; she feels like she’s climbed into his mind, and it’s all chaos and she could stay forever.  
  
When he comes it is with with a stifled rough noise against her neck, like he’s angry with her. Her mind briefly flashes to her IUD, thankfully still good for four years, but then he’s releasing her wrists and kneeling in front of her, eyes closed, breathing heavily.  
  
“Stay there,” he orders, voice shaky, moving his hands to her thighs. Lazily, she tangles a hand in his hair, knowing what’s next. She’s so close already, it won’t take long.  
  
He repositions himself a little and slowly licks her opening, and she bites her knuckle, feeling her teeth make an indent on the skin. She feels him laugh against her and then his tongue is on her clit, the flat of it moving against her as he slips one finger inside. It doesn’t take too much of this before the orgasm sweeps over her like something inevitable and she cries out softly into her hand, her muscles contracting quickly and then slowly.  
  
Then she is boneless, and he moves to lie beside her on the floor. His hand tangles in her hair.  
  
Of course, her logic creeps its way back in after a few minutes, and the repercussions hit her like a ton of bricks: She’d just fucked a former time terrorist. Moreover, this doesn’t bother her nearly as much as it probably should.   
  
A deep breath, and another. She looks at him as his eyes start to close, one of his hands in her hair and the other curled over her bare hip. She must look ridiculous, with no pants on and her shirt pulled up, but she can’t summon the energy to fix herself. He doesn’t seem to care.  
  
“Beautiful Lucy,” he breathes, and she can tell he’s falling asleep. And then… well, it isn’t sudden. The feeling is slow. The lines of his face are relaxed, almost peaceful, and she feels a stirring in her, a kind of fondness she hadn’t felt since…  
  
Since Hollywood. She sits up, moving his heavy arm off her hip. He stirs a little but the post-coital sleep is weighing on him heavily. She quietly adjusts her top and finds her pants and underwear, pulling them on.  
  
She tries to open the door quietly, but he sits up as it creaks open like a too-loud yawn in the middle of the night, and looks at her as she leaves, eyes cast in shadow.  
  
The stirring resurfaces, but she ignores it.  
  
And then, in the bathroom, infuriatingly, there’s the mark on her throat.

* * *

  
The day passes by too slowly, too quietly. The next crisis is sure to show up any minute now, and Lucy almost wishes it would stop taking its sweet time. Clad in her one turtleneck, she curls up on the couch next to Jiya, who fortunately acts as a barrier between her and Jessica. She _wants_ to like Jessica, really she does. She just doesn’t actually like her yet.  
  
The three of them watch _Vanderpump Rules_ in silence. Rufus eventually joins them and makes wry comments about the inane action on screen; his girlfriend tells him to shut up. Flynn wanders over at some point and hands her a bowl of popcorn before retreating to his room, and eventually Jess wanders away to talk to Wyatt, and in spite of everything that happened the night before, that still puts Lucy’s stomach in a tight knot.  
  
Then Rufus and Connor are in a corner, talking about something technological in low voices, and Jiya turns to Lucy, ankles crossed.  
  
“Whatever this is,” she says quietly, gesturing to the popcorn and not meaning the popcorn. “Is it helping?”   
  
“Helping with what?”  
  
“The pain,” she says, and Lucy wonders what advice Jiya could possibly derive from her poor sex-related decisions. Or maybe, she reasons, she just cares. She hadn’t been close to Jiya at first, but now she’s grown slowly close to her as more than just an extension of her fondness for Rufus.  
  
So Lucy verbalizes something she hadn’t allowed herself to even think. “Maybe I have a type,” she says lowly, eyes not leaving the television screen. “Men who are still in love with their dead wives. Maybe I’m trying to punish myself for the things my mother has done.”  
  
“Don’t psych yourself out,” Jiya says. But she looks uncertain, like her own hold on the here and now is unsteady, uncertain. It’s understandable, given her circumstances. “I mean, I can see how he looks at you…”  
  
“Did you see how Wyatt used to look at me?” she counters, and then frowns. “Actually, did you? You’re part of the timeline where Jessica was alive.”  
  
“Lucy,” she says, almost reluctantly, “I can see how he still looks at you. But you deserve someone who’s there.”    
  
“This isn’t important,” she mutters, slouching a little. Between this inane topic and the hickey, she feels like she’s sixteen again, and not in the smart, preparing-for-five-AP-exams kind of way. “It’s just distracting me from the mission.”  
  
“You’re a human being. You need comfort, too,” Jiya says, the statement more sensible than emotive. “I mean, not that I’m endorsing screwing around with Flynn…” She winces at her own words.  
  
“Let’s stop talking about this.”  
  
“Yeah, let’s,” her friend says quickly, and takes a fistful of popcorn.

* * *

  
She can hear him snoring softly through the door. Three in the morning, and these visits can’t be excused as anything less than habitual at this point. She sneaks in, shutting the door silently, and sits at the side of his bed, reasoning through something before climbing in with him.  
  
It feels natural, like she belongs there. His arm wraps itself around her waist. “Took you long enough,” he grumbles, voice thick with sleep. His accent is somehow stronger when he’s tired.  
  
“I don’t belong to you,” she says suddenly. “You know that, right?”  
  
He shifts against her. “Revisiting the Suffragette movement, are we?”  
  
“You can’t just… be a part of someone, take away all separation, and then let them go.” She isn’t making sense. His hand finds its way to her cheek and she cranes her neck to look at him at his silent urging. His eyes are black in the dim lighting, nothing to distinguish iris from pupil.  
  
“No,” he says intently, after a moment. "You can’t.”  
  
Maybe it isn’t fair to bring that baggage here, but after all the shit Flynn has put her through in their past dealings, she doesn’t feel too bad. She breaks the glance. Emotions aren’t her strong suit; she’d rather deal in facts, but everything has been so malleable lately.  
  
She wants some sort of solidity. He knows this.  
  
She turns her body so she’s facing him more comfortably. “I meant what I said,” he says, and she realizes his fingers are tracing the skin of her hip. It’s more sensual than sexual, and she doesn’t know when it started. “During the Revolution.”  
  
“You said a lot of things back then.” Not all of them pleasant.   
  
“I want my family back. But I’m not a part of them anymore. This is what I am. You,” and their eyes lock and she doesn’t know what to make of the thin vulnerability winding itself through her ribcage, “ _you_ are what I am.”  
  
“What does that say about me?” she murmurs, half a joke, half serious. He isn’t a good person.    
  
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. His hand leaves her hip and traces the side of her neck, where the foundation is wearing off. He lightly taps the hickey. “This bothered you.”  
  
She’s piecing together why it did. Something about how people claim one another, but it’s sometimes a lie. Something about how you can’t trust solidity, even when it appears indisputable. It seems he’s gathered the same point from her disjointed insecurities, and he traces the mark gently.  
  
“Next time,” she says drowsily, “choose a less visible place.”  
  
He laughs, the beam of light breaking his face. He isn’t good, but he isn’t bad either. Angry, yes. Unstable, sure. But not bad. “I can manage that,” he says.  
  
And finally, they both rest.  

**Author's Note:**

> .  
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> I haven't seen the series finale yet and from what I hear, I might not like it particularly. So. Anyway. I hope you enjoyed this chronologically inaccurate pile of trash.


End file.
